Pomo Periscope II: Recommended Reading

18 October 2006 at 8:51 am Nicolai Foss Leave a comment

| Nicolai Foss |

Here is an old but excellent paper by the great French sociologist Raymond Boudon, “The Freudian-Marxian-Structuralist (FMS) movement in France: variations on a theme by Sherry Turkle,” Revue Tocqueville, vol. II, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 5-24. (Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t seem to exist online, but your library should be capable of getting it for you). The paper is highly recommended, not only for its dissection of the FMS, but also because so much of what says about the FMS fits more contemporary pomo trends perfectly.Specifically, Boudon describes the FMS in terms of characteristic features such as 1) “its taste for opacity,” 2) “a basic anti-Popperian epistemology,” 3) the implicit assumption “the truth … is implicitly considered as revealed to some elected major intellectuals;” 4) “scholastic reasoning” (one point Boudon makes is that adherents of the FMS are incapable of understanding PD-like situations), and 5) its “stylistic effects” (i.e., the stilted writing style).

I particularly liked this critique of the highly celebrated Bourdieu:

For the sociologist Bourdieu ‘violence’ defines any situation where a subject has not explicitly and consciously chosen to do what he does. Once this innocent definition is accepted, it is easy to show that role learning, and as a matter of fact, any learning is the result of violence and .. domination. Finally domination implies the existence of a dominant and of a dominated class. Hence the very existence of a schooling process is grounded in, and hence is a proof for the existence of a two class system. QED.